On Sunday, my black lab puppy had his first birthday. And I have to say that it was the best birthday party I had ever planned.

First we went on a really long walk at the local farm. We played frisbee until the sun went down. He jumped so high and so often that we actually almost tired him out. Later, we went for hot dogs and ice cream. (OK - he didn't really get any of those.) And we bought him dog presents.

His favorite toy was one I had to pick out very carefully to make sure that it would withstand his craziness. You see, he's a real chewer. Not an average chewer, not a strong chewer, and even more than a powerful chewer. A wild chewer. It's almost like they needed to create a new category of chewer for him.

And that's just what had to be done for the latest VMware VMmark virtualization benchmark result from IBM. This new#1 result was so high that they had to create a new 48-core category for it.(1)

I'm really looking forward to even more virtualization benchmarks which are coming very soon. Just like I'm really looking forward to my black lab's next birthday when he may calm down --- just one tiny bit.

"A resource-intensive OLTP benchmark, based on a fair-use implementation of the TPC-C* workload specification" was used. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that means. Doesn't sound like the official TPC-C benchmark and the result certainly isn't out on the TPC-C site is it ? Remember that IBM has the #1 TPC-C result on the planet.(1) Do the math on those transactions.

"The most resource-intensive load ever shown in a virtual environment to date" is claimed. I'm sure that you mainframe guys out there like that one.

The data presented was based on "single VM performance." That's like saying since I can get my dog to bark, I can surely get him to talk. What about the real area of interest, multiple VMs ? And if you want to talk single VM - IBM Power System implementations run on top of a hypervisor - so every single world-record result on a Power System is run with a single VM on a virtualization solution - and gets 100% of native performance.

I'm partial to all beef hot dogs. And I'm still not sure here - "Where's the beef?"